At present, the telecommunications industry anticipates that millions of MTC devices catering to variety of use cases that will impose a significant burden on telecommunication networks in the near future. This influx of MTC devices introduces a huge opportunity and unseen challenges for telecommunications industry. Current narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) enhancements in LTE networks permit MTC servers to use existing LTE procedures and infrastructure to facilitate communications involving MTC devices. Notably, existing connectivity with a MTC device still relies on LTE and 3GPP based procedures, which may not necessarily be needed for devices that frequently send and receive small amount amounts of data to an application server (AS).
More specifically, data connectivity for MTC devices at present requires complex LTE procedures for simple transmissions containing miniscule data to a MTC application server. Notably, existing procedures exhibit an unnecessary amount of signaling traffic exchange to setup a communication path between a MTC device and a MTC application server as compared to the associated transaction time needed. For example, a smart electricity meter MTC device that typically sends a few kilobytes (KBs) of data in milliseconds may have to wait for five seconds for a communication path to be established. Moreover, the amount of signaling triggered for establishing a communication path by the continuously increasing number of MTC devices might necessitate the re-dimensioning of the entire LTE network. Notably, the proportion of latency and setup times as compared to the small data transfer gives notion of the inefficient use of the LTE network.
Accordingly, there is a need for methods, systems, and computer readable media for optimizing MTC device signaling.